#vocation

The creative impulse can be killed, but it cannot be taught...What a teacher can do...in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn. As far as I'm concerned, this providing of oxygen is one of the noblest of all vocations. ↗

— Madeleine L'Engle

#creativity #teaching #vocation #art

How lucky, I thought, were people who had known from earliest childhood what they wanted to do. All the children in my grammar school, who said they wanted to be doctors, had grown up to become doctors. This was also the case apparently with firemen, veterinarians, songwriters, and race car drivers. I had opted for a kind of pure experience, which, as Doo-Wah had pointed out, is not usually something you get paid for. I did not want to write a book about it. I did not want to write so much as an article. I wanted to be left alone with my experience and go on to the next thing, whatever that was. ↗

— Laurie Colwin

#laurie-colwin #vocationon #experience

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now. ↗

— Anaïs Nin

#education #experiments #growth #life #mistakes

Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavours, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavour, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God's calling, can matter forever. ↗

— Timothy Keller

#christianity #vocation #workplace #worldview #life

I did a little theatre work after that and the following year I got another part in a television series. Then it was almost to the end of the year before I got more work. That was coming to terms with the reality of the vocation I had chosen. ↗

— Karl Urban

#almost #another #before #chosen #coming

Well, in the first place, military service, they don't call it service for nothing. You are actually serving your country. And it is a worthy and valid vocation. ↗

— Rick Warren

#call #country #first #military #military service

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost. ↗

— Seamus Heaney

#arrival #elevation #fact #itself #life

We're not a vocational school. If someone wants to get a high-paying job, I would hope that there are easier ways to do it than working through a formal computer science curriculum. ↗

— Philip Greenspun

#computer science #curriculum #easier #formal #get

There are many experiments and a great deal of research that can be performed on the station that make a difference in our lives and we are committed to supporting this important vocation. ↗

— Marc Garneau

#deal #difference #experiments #great #great deal

My intention to lecture is as vague as my intention is to go on the stage. I will never consider an offer to lecture, not because I despise the vocation, but because I have no desire to appear on the public rostrum. ↗

— Mary MacLane

#because #consider #desire #despise #go